
Chapter 25
What Did Galois Do or Know?
This is not a scholarly book on the history of mathematics, but it does contain a
substantial amount of historical material, intended to locate the topic in its context
and to motivate Galois theory as currently taught at undergraduate level. (At the
research frontiers, the entire subject is even more general and more abstract.)
There is a danger in this approach: it can mix up history as it actually happened
with how we reformulate the ideas now. This can easily be misinterpreted, distort-
ing our view of the past and propagating historical myths. Peter Neumann makes
this point very effectively in his admirable ...